Over the last two decades the Information Technology (IT) industry has moved from providing dedicated and relatively low impact solutions to complex multi-vendor systems that permeate all levels of every company's infrastructure. If an IT asset or system fails it may have a direct impact on a company's ability to function, for a trading room no shares can be traded, for an airline no seats sold and for a retail organization sales lost.
As IT has grown in importance to business, the role of IT management systems has evolved from simple technical tools utilized by engineers to remote control hardware to applications used by business managers attempting to understand the cost and impact of IT or more specifically the failure of IT on their business. The problem is that these tools are complex, expensive and may not be of great use.
Even though the configuration of IT management systems require large amounts of effort, the importance of IT management systems continue to grow for most medium to large business. This results in large resource expenditures to try to reduce IT operating costs and in gaining understanding of IT's role and impact on their business.
Referring to FIG. 1, existing IT Management technologies tend to look the management of IT from the perspective of individual technology verticals, whilst the application crosses all disciplines.
Current IT Management technologies are unable to map application end to end and specifically fail to be able to discover which IT element supports each application.
As businesses have attempted to utilize IT management systems for more complex business and application management they have discovered that this is a very manual process, involving constant maintenance and complex programming. The large cost of support and the product restrictions they encounter makes the task of getting the system running in any meaningful way, difficult with high costs. Data is manually entered and is often out of date before going into production. Critically the data required to program the IT elements that make up each application is often not known, hence the requirement for auto discovery of the elements that make up each application.
Business managers are often asking for more and more automated mapping of their service and business application environment. Existing technologies are aimed at modeling the IT infrastructure from a connectivity point of view rather than mapping the business application or processes from the user to the application(s) they are accessing and showing the impact of an IT resource failure from business impact perspective utilizing an automatically maintained application model as a reference.